


Is This the World We Devastated, Right to the Bone?

by Snow



Category: Guilty Gear
Genre: Gen, Moving On, guilty gear: black side au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 11:30:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/609343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snow/pseuds/Snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ky Kiske died, and Sol promised he would be the Commander in his absence. He never promised to be Hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Is This the World We Devastated, Right to the Bone?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spoilers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoilers/gifts).



> Many thanks to mikeneko for the beta!

"Commander? Did you want to say something?"

Sol looked at the kid -- they _all_ looked like kids today, even the ones who were in their early forties, like the soldier talking to him now -- and shook his head.

Words didn't change anything. They wouldn't bring Ky back, wouldn't change the body in front of him. Wouldn't even do anything about the blood on either of their uniforms that had long since congealed and dried.

"Sir? Just a few words?"

Sol turned to the soldier, menace deliberate in his eyes, calculated to make the woman back off. "No," he growled, and she physically stepped back before she caught herself, swallowed, composed herself enough to say the words that he wouldn't.

He didn't listen to them, didn't look at the other knights to see how it affected them, just gave the body one last look and walked away.

* * *

Ky had been remarkably on top of the paperwork -- remarkable not just because most people stopped caring about paperwork when they were fighting on the front in a war but also because he had run out of some of the forms. Ky had just recreated them on blank sheets of paper, or the back of other forms when he'd run out of blank sheets. Sol had no intention of following his example: he cleared the desk by sticking all the papers into a box. It could get sent back to headquarters, and maybe then they'd get some new supplies in return.

Yeah, right. He was half-tempted to send Ky's body back to headquarters instead -- it was only a body now, after all -- see if that got him the supplies they needed. But he was smart enough today to know that a simple addition of supplies wouldn't change the course of this war.

"Sir?" It was that woman again, the one from Ky's funeral. Sol knew her name, didn't bother to call it to mind. Maybe she'd known Ky, maybe that was why she was so concerned. 

Don't be stupid, Sol thought. Everyone was concerned. Ky had been their hope, their planned savior, and now he was just another martyr, and Sol wasn't fit to be his replacement. He'd promised, sure, promised a dying kid, but the dying kid was dead now, wouldn't know if Sol had kept his word or not, it didn't matter to him. And this was a distraction. Joining the Order had corresponded to Sol's goals; leading it didn't.

"Y'want my job?" Sol asked her, eyebrow raised.

She opened her mouth to respond, and for a moment he thought he saw a certain fire in her eyes, then her mouth snapped shut again.

"Well?" he prompted, figuring it would get her to either spit it out or leave him be. He'd take either.

"I think you should focus on _doing_ it," she snapped, then left.

He stared after her, and grunted. It wasn't really his issue if she was upset. She probably didn't think he was grieving enough, but the truth was he's already spent too much time feeling, way more than he was comfortable with. He had to hold himself together, had to move on to acting.

He grabbed Fireseal, and went to look for something to hit.

* * *

He wasn't human, but he could still bleed. Could still ache, even if his bones didn't break from a simple thing like being thrown around by Justice. Could still pick himself up again and again, could gather all his fire around him and bring it forward to slam attack after attack into the monster that had once _been_ human, and who had lost even more than he had.

He wasn't human, but he could still be killed, and in the instant where Justice loomed over him, when Fireseal was wrenched away from him and tossed to the ground, it occurred to Sol that he should still care about that. He still had work to do. What was important was that he survived, not that he replace Ky. 

The kid, after all, was dead and buried, and Sol had no plans to join him.

He reclaimed his sword after Justice left, returned to camp and ordered them all to pack up. He knew where Justice was going. They just had to meet her there.

* * *

The troops cheered him for the first time, after he killed Justice. It had been easy, in the end, to drive Fireseal through the shell of her armor, to cut and slice and to watch the blood spill out of her. To watch inhuman eyes fade, locked on his.

They cheered him, and he felt something cold inside him. This wasn't his mission, wasn't what he needed to do. It was just a part of that, and after a grunted command to give the troops the evening off, he left for his room to clean his sword off and sleep.

He slept long enough that they had run out of liquor and energy by the time he woke, long enough that when he woke it was quiet, the stillness of people who weren't sleeping on guard.

Despite that, there was a noise, and Sol's lips started to tick up, as he imagined a few still-going revelers, before he realized that the sound was coming from outside the camp, not inside.

He trapped the Gear there instead of killing it, long enough for someone to confirm that it shouldn't be moving yet was, long enough to show that it wasn't just some badly programmed menace. Then he killed it, but there was no relish in it, no sense of relief. They had a bigger problem than Justice, then, but it didn't have That Man's signature flare on it, which meant it came from yet another direction. 

Sol was ready to walk away, to get his focus back to That Man instead.

* * *

There were things he could do, as the commander of an army that he couldn't do as a lone force on a mission. It almost took Sol too long to realize that. He was used to using the people around him, sure, but there was a stark difference between doing _that_ and organizing them like an actual army beyond the brute force. He wasn't sure the tip he got -- the location of a _Gear Plant_ \-- was trustworthy, but he was willing to put some lives out on a limb now in the hope of some progress. 

Something had to give, and Sol was determined that it wouldn't be him.


End file.
